Oligarchy, page 8
‘And the captions? What did they say?’
‘Really sad stuff,’ says Tash. Should she share any of it? She suddenly realises that of course the posts are public anyway. How odd that people might find them and not realise that the girl they are looking at is dead: the girl in the white bikini posing by the double bed with crumpled white sheets and a horse sculpture and lake in the background. ‘They said things like “I want to float away”. Some stuff about Ophelia from Hamlet. Something about a black diamond.’
‘Do you know Hamlet?’
‘Not really,’ says Tash. ‘They did it as a ballet or something at school last year? I think Bianca was Ophelia. She was obsessed with her anyway, and Princess Augusta, of course.’
Aunt Sonja is nodding. Her eyes are closed. If it wasn’t for the Botox she’d be frowning right now. She breathes slowly and then opens her eyes.
‘This is becoming a very interesting case,’ she says.
‘Case?’ says Natasha, but then Aunt Sonja gets a text on her phone and has to pop outside for a moment. While she is gone, Tash puts extra butter on her potatoes and mashes it in and eats it quickly, before anyone notices. That would be like an extra 5 points on Weight Watchers, but it doesn’t count on Christmas Day, right? Tash tries to care and feel guilty and be the kind of person who complains to their skinny friends on Instagram that they have just binged and want to die, but she finds she actually doesn’t give a shit.
On Boxing Day a car takes Natasha and Aunt Sonja to Battersea Heliport, where a helicopter is waiting for them. Taking off feels like being pulled up by a feeble thread and then dangling from it, like a spider that has been taken from the bath and is being put outside.
‘We can go wherever we want!’ declares Aunt Sonja over the roar of the engine. ‘Because we are rich!’ Or something like that. She could actually be saying anything, because it’s too loud to hear. She doesn’t often smile, but she smiles now, now she’s in danger, and high, literally high over the sparkle of London, the eternal fluorescence.
*
Rachel contemplates the plate of food in front of her. It could be worse. She can eat the sprouts and the bit of turkey without skin. If she was taking veganism seriously she would leave the turkey as well, but she has to eat something. She knows that. She knows the dangers of ‘starvation mode’, where your desperate body puts on weight even with no food, and becomes able to pull grams of fat from anywhere: even body creams, even things you touch, even from the fat of people around you. That’s what Tiffanie once said. She said it in a biology lesson and Dr Morgan, who was normally so mild, actually completely lost it and sent her out of the room. He looked as if he might cry afterwards, like he was the kind of person – like Rachel, like Rachel’s mother – who can’t get angry without also crying.
Rachel can’t have the potatoes or the parsnips because they have too many grams of carbohydrate. The bread sauce is made of, well, bread. No one, literally no one, eats bread. White flour is made of all the unhealthiest bits of wheat, which has in any case been genetically modified to be addictive, like opium. That’s what Rachel’s older brother Elliot has told her. Refined flours get caught in the little thingummies in your gut and irritate them and then your gut gets so inflamed it rips apart and bits of white flour go zooming around in your actual blood and can even make you die or catch schizophrenia. The white sauce is made from dairy, which means the bloody pus of enslaved cows who are forcefully impregnated and have their babies taken away. Dairy gives you spots and makes you fat because it isn’t designed to be eaten by adult humans. It gives you mucus, thick ropes of it coming out of your nose and sometimes going into your brain. You can drown in your own mucus, and it will serve you right.
Cranberry sauce, meanwhile, is almost entirely sugar. Rachel saw her mother making it, first thing this morning while it was still dark outside. She was wearing her white dressing gown, the neck smeared and dark with make-up, and she was stirring an entire cup of white – WHITE – sugar into the saucepan with the frozen cranberries.
‘Don’t tell your brother,’ she’d said to Rachel.
So many things are made entirely from sugar. Bread, quite apart from everything else, turns into a bowl of sugar in your stomach. Literally a whole bowl. The same is true of fruit. Fruit nowadays has been specifically bred by insatiable, corrupt farmers to be full of sugar. Unless you pick your own fruit in the wild, you may as well be eating a bag of Haribo (which are nicer; let’s be honest). Roast potatoes are also sugar, but coated in fat and burnt so they give you cancer. Rachel’s mum does them in goose fat, which is so gross it doesn’t bear thinking about. The parsnips are the same, but just taste worse than the potatoes.
The fat girl Rachel used to be, the one who had seconds and thirds of roast potatoes, and roast-potato sandwiches on Boxing Day, and a whole tin of Roses to herself, is gone. She is dead. Buried. Decomposed. Now she shares her brother’s bowl of quinoa that he’s insisted on having because it is healthy and all this other crap is not. He’s a vegan, but he says Rachel shouldn’t become one quite yet. She should follow a paleo diet until she is thin and then she should transition to being plant-based. He’s barely spoken to her for the last few years, and now all this.
The gym opens on Boxing Day and Elliot takes Rachel with him and this time doesn’t make her hide in the cardio section and pretend not to be his sister while he hangs out with his mates in the weights room. Her old gym stuff already doesn’t fit her, so this morning Rachel snuck into her mother’s bedroom and found a pair of Sweaty Betty leggings and a black Nike top which she put over a pink sports bra that used to be too small for her but isn’t now. She’s layered up some necklaces and wears an ear-cuff that looks almost like a helix piercing. When she loses another stone she’s going to get her navel done. She’s chosen the silver dreamcatcher crystal belly bar she wants from Claire’s Accessories. She looks at it every day. For the first time ever, she knows that something like that could be hers. So far, this is the best Christmas ever.
OK, so no one knows exactly where her father is after all the shouting at the end of Christmas Day, and her grandmother has maybe a week or two left to live, and her sister is back in rehab and— Who cares about all that? Jordon looks at her today: he actually does. He refers to her at one point – in all seriousness – as Elliot’s ‘hot little sister’. And everyone compliments her and gives her advice and even the terrifying fitness instructor twins, Millie and Izzy, look admiringly at Rachel’s arms and midsection and ask her things about her diet and her running programme and for the first time in her life Rachel falls asleep feeling warm and happy and free. After all these years she has the answer. SHE HAS THE ANSWER. It was right in front of her all along, like a handsome prince in disguise, a darkling frog.
*
The castle is on an island you can only reach by air. It is in Scotland. Or maybe Ireland. Some Celtic cold place. They land on the helipad and crunch down a gravel path where they are greeted by someone. A butler? Tash doesn’t know what you would call this person, but he is obviously staff. He has a clipboard and shiny shoes. He shakes hands with Aunt Sonja.
‘The young people are in the hot tubs,’ he says to Natasha. He takes her bag. ‘I’ll show you your room, where you can get ready.’
Natasha follows him in through a side door. It’s like school. She follows him up back-stairways, along carpets that have seen better days, down a corridor cold from an open window, the smell of mildew in the air. Then a longer, wider corridor with large white spaces on the walls where paintings used to be, and wires poking out of light fittings.
Tash thinks of the paintings in the headmaster’s study. All those horses.
‘Not long moved in,’ says the butler. ‘Chaos, really.’
She has not brought a bikini. Really, she should stay in her room and get ready for this evening. She should not be distracted with young people and hot tubs. Is her father going to be here? A thrill runs through her. She’s almost forgotten what he looks like. When she tries to make a picture of him in her head, all that comes is an ageing pop star. What’s his name? Paul McCartney. Father of Stella, who makes the sports clothes. Then comes the image of Tiffanie writing to him, the ancient Beatle Sir Paul, with her turquoise French fountain pen, asking if he is really dead, because of the rumours about the Abbey Road album cover. The girls adore Abbey Road. They found the CD under Bianca’s bed, along with some sheet music and three carrier bags containing mouldering, half-chewed food. Surely, Natasha thought then, surely if someone was going to commit suicide they would not leave secret carrier bags of food under their bed? Surely Bianca wouldn’t want people to see that? But Tash didn’t know why she thought that or if it was even true. She didn’t say anything to the others. She just joined in when everyone said how gross it was and then quietly disposed of the bags in the large bins outside the kitchens.
She tries again to think of her father. Nope. Nico? Nope. Her mother? Yes, she can still see her mother: the hair extensions and the fake breasts and the kitchen table covered with application forms and a massive ashtray.
The hot tubs. Tash walks over to the window and looks out onto large gardens, then cliffs, then sea. She fancies she hears splashing and whooping. What even is a hot tub in this country, in the winter? The young people. Why is that so compelling? She should stay here and do her hair and make-up the way Tiffanie showed her, but she wants to find the young people. She wants to know how to be one of them. So it’s back down the corridors, that same lost feeling she still has at school. A side door.
It’s not splashing she hears first, but the clinking of glasses.
The hot tubs are across the gardens, beyond a maze she is glad she didn’t try to walk through. It’s freezing. Not as cold as home, of course, but how would you get to the hot tubs in a bikini even if you had one? What would you wear on your feet?
Two large brass capsules looking out over the sea. Steam rising from them like a twinkless winter mist. There is a waiter standing to one side by a table with ice buckets with champagne in them. His face is expressionless. Is this serious?
‘Who the fuck are you?’ comes a deep, confident voice from one of the hot tubs.
He would be attractive if it wasn’t for the sneer. Dark hair; pale skin. He looks Tash up and down as if she is something he has ordered online. In the tub with him is another teenage boy with red hair and massive freckles. They are both around sixteen, maybe seventeen. In the other tub are four thin, blonde girls. They also look Tash up and down, and she suddenly sees what they are seeing. The slight curve in her cheeks. The DD breasts that have come from nowhere this year. The moon-like shape of her bum.
Tash’s legs suddenly feel like they are made out of the stuff in Bianca’s carrier bags.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ she says back before she can stop herself. She wants to sound badass, but all she can hear is the Russian accent that they are all hearing. The broken reed of her voice. Her words sounding childish; not clever, not flirtatious.
‘He’s Teddy Ross,’ says the freckled friend. ‘And you must be Natasha, the mail-order Russian bride.’
The girls in the other hot tub laugh, their bodies bobbing up and down like hard pieces of fusilli coming to the boil.
‘Really?’ says Tash. ‘I don’t think so.’
Her legs. The rancid food wobbling, unable to hold her up. Her breath, frozen somewhere between her chest and her mouth. Her ridiculous heartbeat. Her glimmerless life. She turns, shakily, and leaves, like an am-dram nobody who has fucked up the only line she ever had.
When Tash gets back to her room she feels cold and stupid. She puts on the Balmain dress with no pleasure and realises she looks fat in it, even in the 36. She is huge. She protrudes. She is a protuberance. A massive bulge. A cartoon of a stick woman covered in semi-circles. If she allows herself to breathe out she actually looks pregnant. She is simply enormous. The largest woman in the castle, certainly, but perhaps even on the planet.
The dinner is in a large dining room with a lot of different-sized glasses and white napkins. Natasha is seated between two old English ladies who have a conversation over her about problems to do with interior designers, first-class rail travel, the editor of the Telegraph and a dangerous communist called Jeremy Corbyn. Natasha has trouble with the food. There is too much of it. It is not vegetarian. She does not know how to eat it. Some of it is slimy.
‘Are you one of the prostitutes, dear?’ the lady on her left asks her, during pudding.
At least that’s what Tash thinks she says, as brown juice from the crme caramel drips down her tired, powdered face.
*
Back at school there’s no quinoa. Rachel looks at the lunch Mrs Cuckoo has made and there is nothing, literally nothing, to eat. She takes a plateful of green beans and some pineapple and feels so happy when a few of the other girls do the same. Are they actually copying her because they want what she now has? Everyone is fascinated with her. They examine her body in excruciating detail, and she loves it. She really loves it. Tiffanie, who usually ignores Rachel completely, actually feels her biceps and smiles and winks.
It’s now that sad sleepy time on a Sunday evening. Everyone has changed out of their travel skirts and into jeans or leggings. Rachel has gone for a run, which isn’t really allowed in the dark, but with all the bright lights in the school no one can really see what’s going on outside. No one can see the hibernating animals, or the dead spiders and their rotten webs. The tenebrous lake.
After supper Sin-Jin appears in the Year 11 common room.
‘Girls,’ she says to the apples, who are in the corner hogging the CD player as usual, playing their out-dated music on out-dated tech. She raises her eyebrows and they know what this means. They’ve been sort of waiting for this.
They follow her to the headmaster’s office. So word has finally got out about the party, then. The Malibu. All the endless pale puke and Tash and Tiffanie lying there like Snow White. That was what Lissa said to Tash, that she looked like Snow White. Could Tash be thought of like that, as actually beautiful? She’s never really thought of it before. Anyway, stupid Dr Morgan said he wouldn’t tell, but of course he did. He’s an adult and a teacher and they are not Becky with the bad hair so—
‘Thank you for coming, girls,’ says Dr Moone in his grave voice. He’s sitting behind his vast desk and they are all standing haphazardly in front of it like they have been gathered together in a bucket: apples ready to be bobbed by children with sharp teeth, or kittens ready to be given away to whoever will have them, or else … He takes a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid there’s been another incident. Some of you undoubtedly know about it already. I’m going to have to ask once again for your complete confidentiality on this.’
‘Of course, sir,’ murmurs Rachel.
‘Yes,’ says Lissa. ‘Absolutely.’
Tash glances at Tiffanie. Donya and Dani look at the ground.
‘I understand that all of you were involved with the incident at the Christmas party,’ says Dr Moone. ‘Now, although you should be in trouble for bringing alcohol into the school, we will put that to one side for the moment, because it seems that two of you went through a rather regrettable ordeal.’ He looks at his desk. ‘Which, I’m afraid, has only come to light over the break.’
Glances and side-eyes and half-frowns.
‘We are going to need to talk separately to the two girls who were drinking.’
Tash breathes in. Her legs feel strange and weightless. She looks at Tiffanie. Of course, they were all supposed to be drinking except Donya, but the others didn’t like the Malibu and went downstairs for Diet Coke instead. They pretended to be drunk but were not drunk. Everyone sort of vaguely knows this without really knowing it, but in any case the headline events of the evening involved Tash and Tiffanie vomiting so much they literally almost died, and Dr Morgan secretly helping them to bed and everyone promising never to tell.
‘We are going to organise counselling for all of you,’ says Dr Moone.
Counselling? But—
‘Dr Morgan is dead,’ says Dr Moone. ‘I’m sorry if this is a shock. I want you to know that this is not your fault.’
Tash glances at Tiffanie again. Not their fault? What’s that supposed to mean?
‘Once again,’ says Dr Moone, ‘I need to ask for your complete co-operation on this. I need you all to keep this totally confidential. The school will be responding formally to the police inquiry. If any of you are approached by the press, or by the police, you are to say nothing and come straight to me, do you understand? The tabloids love murky stories about private schools and they’ll have us shut down in an instant if we handle this badly.’
‘How did he die?’ asks Donya.
‘He drowned himself,’ says Dr Moone. ‘Like Bianca. Now, I need to have a few moments alone with the girls who were drinking that night, please.’
Tash and Tiffanie look at one another again. The others shuffle out of the office, glancing back and making concerned faces. Sin-Jin closes the door.
The headmaster sighs.
‘We found some unpleasant pictures in with Dr Morgan’s things. Don’t worry: they have been destroyed. Well, all except the ones he took of Bianca Downlowe. We will be passing those to the police. We saw no reason why the pictures he took of you girls need be part of this investigation. He is dead; Bianca is dead. The whole thing has been extremely unfortunate, but the time has come to draw a line under—’
‘Pictures of us?’ says Tash. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘From during the incident,’ hisses Sin-Jin.
‘What incident?’
Dr Moone sighs. ‘Of course, you were very drunk, and perhaps you don’t remember. This is something to explore with the counsellors. We understand that Dr Morgan wasn’t in the dormitory on his own with you for very long: perhaps only ten minutes. It wasn’t …’ Dr Moone’s blank eyes fall and hit the desk but do not bounce. He looks up again slowly. ‘It wasn’t long enough for, well, the worst. We don’t think the worst happened.’
